Monday, November 28, 2011

A Look at the Isle and Carcosa Maps!

Just got the proofs in for the cloth map extras I'll be offering when the books go on sale next week. These maps will be printed in the appropriate book's endpapers, but I thought it would be good to offer stand-alone maps as well.

I originally planned on doing them in the soft-cloth Ultima style. But those aren't good for a lot of detail, because the ink bleeds too much on that material, and I wanted the hex numbers to show up on these maps. They're perfect for player maps, I think. (hexcrawl exploration purists are going to lynch me for that one, aren't they?) This next shot was supposed to show off the material - it's a soft canvas-like fabric, but the texture of the back of the map didn't show up too well... but you can see a bit more detail on the maps themselves so why not.

After a bit of thought and a quick post on G+, here's something entertaining I thought of.

"Carcassonne" + "Carcosa"

Carcosassonne

Carcassonne: "The Carcassonne is a clever tile-laying game. The southern French city of Carcassonne is famous for its unique roman and medieval fortifications. The players develop the area around Carcassonne and deploy their followers on the roads, in the cities, in the cloisters, and in the fields. The skill of the players to develop the area will determine who is victorious."

I'm fairly certain this description could be tweaked to fit Carcosa amazingly well. So many hilarious possibilities for madness and unleashing elder beings.

I like the weird to sneak up on folks and green means open ground that isn't desert to my eyes. Not that the purple is bad at all.I went with wile-e-cotoye mountains and archaic Russian pickle forests for the weird on the map I did.

With major land features named like H.P. Lovecraft choking on his breakfast there's not much room for that kind of subtlety (which is no doubt one of the reasons I like Carcosa). I did like the forests and mountains, though.

Funny how we humans create mental images of places, people and things we've never seen. Despite its being "Unknown" I had a clear picture of the Isle in my head, and it was longer north-south than east-west, and slightly curved like a crescent moon. But it's not like that at all. It looks more like a redesigned Iceland. Which is all good, and makes much better sense in layout terms.